Resistance is salvageable

[Commissar]

Eric Brooks

---

Eric Brooks wasn’t a bad father. Not really. Perhaps he’d made a few bad decisions, but, among the fire and chaos of Leeds, who wouldn’t have? Eric exhaled, his breath fogging the dark glass of his displays. Four windows hung around his head like shrouds, four readouts bright against the eternal night of the cockpit. Comms, course, systems, and weapons. He’d been watching them for so long that the blinking displays had lost all meaning.

Before the planet fell, he’d worked on the mine consoles, sorting the crap from the chrome. Wasn’t so different from where he was now. Same glowing screens, same grinding tedium. Admittedly, he hadn’t drunk his own recycled piss for weeks on end on Leeds, but the air quality in the cockpit was better.

Fifty kilometres below him, the jump hole to Omicron Minor continued its leisurely orbit around Sigma-17’s sun. Looked like nothing so much as another patch of empty space on his optics, but his waran’s sensors told a different story. He’d silenced the bomber’s incessant anomaly warnings after the first ten minutes. He’d have done it sooner, but he’d been too busy trying to find the correct damned command. Over the three days he’d spent sharing an orbit with the jumphole Eric had grown to hate the patient son of a b---h. He thumbed his comm.

“We’ve been sitting on our arses for six days, Lance. Where the hell are those transports?” Eric didn’t bother checking the frustration in his voice.

“Did it ever occur to you-” Lance’s voice drifted across the comms, slow lethargic, and as bored as it was possible for a man to be. A man with all the time in the world. If corpses could speak, they’d sound like Lance. “Eric? That you would have far fewer problems in life if you learned to keep your mouth shut.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eric barked. Lance’s Dromedary must have been drifting somewhere within line-of-sight for Eric to raise him on the radio, but he was damned if he could see his colleague.

“Whatever, it is, I’ll do it. Just leave them alone. I can pay. Isn’t that what you said?” Lance was a career criminal, an enforcer for loan sharks and a recruiter for a dozen groups that focused more on credits than violence pay off their debts. There was nothing malicious in his voice, no hatred, no rage. Just dull statements of fact, like he was reporting on the weather. “It occurs to me that for a man in more debt than his organs are worth, you would do well to focus your attention on paying it off. You’ve already been waiting six days. You can afford to wait a little while longer.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one sitting in a coffin with a catheter hooked over his dick.” Eric drummed his fingers on the control column, ignoring the ration crumbs floating between him and the controls. “Sitting around for a week wasn’t part of the deal. I haven’t seen anything ‘cept empty space.”

“There was no deal.” Lance sighed, his voice crackling over the comm. “I have no desire to have this conversation with you again.You wanted that ticket. You took the money. My client is entitled to repayment in whatever manner he deems fit. He choose to exact it in the form of labor.”

“Come on, man. I needed that money to get my family off Leeds. I didn’t sign up to be your client’s attack dog.” Eric scowled at his display. One of the lights on his ‘course’ window was flashing. Collision Warning. He checked the comms window for new contacts and came up empty. No-one else in space but him and his babysitter. “Overpriced piece of crap.”

“I’m certain he will be flattered that you think so.” Lance’s voice was heavy with finality, the irritated tone of a man who wanted nothing more than for his conversational partner to shut up. “You agreed to the terms of the loan, nonetheless.”

“Not talking about the damn loan.” Eric jabbed a finger at his display, as though Lance was watching over his shoulder, could see it. Frankly, he wouldn’t have been surprised if he could. “Tell your client he needs to blow some of his cash on better gear. Computer’s seeing ghosts. I’ve got a collision warning that’s been flashing for, what, a minute now.”

Lance was silent for a long moment. When he did speak, for the first time Eric could remember, there was a trace of life in his voice. “Arm weapons.”

“What?” Eric scrambled for his belts, shoved a free-floating bottle into an elastic cradle under the seat.

“Arm. Your. Torpedoes.” Eric couldn’t see Lance, but he could hear the feral smirk in the man’s voice. The Dromedary faded from his display as the last few non-essential systems shut down. “The gods of commerce have answered your prayers. No ghosts. Transports are jumping in. Put a torpedo in the first one to come through, and the rest’ll hand over whatever they’ve got. Let me do the talking. I’ll send messages via your ship.”

“Not joining the fight?” Eric tightened the straps and raked his hand over the control panel. He was rewarded with a series of confirmations as warheads on his display cycled from amber to green. Armed. “Don’t want to scratch a nail?”

Lance didn’t dignify that with a response. Didn’t need to. They both knew the answer. As far as Lance and his client were concerned, Eric was expendable, and this was their way of making damn sure he knew it.

The jumphole shimmered on his sensors, and a transport shuddered, drifting, in to real space. Squat and short, a semicircular cargo bay rose out of the vessel’s spine like an undersized centrifuge. The waran’s system helpfully flagged it as a Humpback-class freighter, miles from home and, apparently, without any escort to speak of. A heartbeat later, a second humpback jumped in next to it. Both transponders flashed the same identification: Vereinigte Widerstandarmee. “Any idea who these guys are? Vinegar wine and tea or something.”

“Not your concern.” Lance cut him off. “Fire. Target the one on the left.”

Eric shrugged and wrapped a hand around the control column, cycled the targeting to the indicated humback. His comms array crackled, but Eric was focused on the steady stream of information feeding from his targeting computer to the missiles.

“Unknown contact, this is Widerstand freighter Tiananmen. Identify yourself, over.” Eric thumbed the mute. Easier that way. The transponders had been the first thing they’d ripped out of his ship.

“Sorry buddy. A man’s got debts.” Eric pulled the trigger, and the waran shuddered in response.

Two torpedoes leapt from their tubes, accelerating at 11Gs, long arcs of plasma spewing into the vacuum behind them. Nova torpedoes, with enough bite in them to punch through the hull of a military gunboat like it was paper mache. He felt almost sorry for the crew of the freighter. Evidently not anywhere near as sorry as they were feeling for themselves, but sympathy kept you human, right?

Tiananmen had seen the torpedoes coming, and the freighter began to pulse on his screen as it pumped energy into engines, slowly accelerating away. Not fast enough. 30 seconds to impact. Eric punched another switch on the column, sent a disruptor arcing up and ahead of the torpedoes. The freighter’s engines flickered, coughed, and went silent. Dead in the water.

20 Seconds. Eric powered up his own engines and began to pull up and away from the freighters. He was still far beyond direct-weapons range, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be in the way when what was left of Tiananmen came skating through.

10 Seconds.

The freighter had got its engines online again, had turned and was sprinting back towards the jump point. Tiananmen had opened up with it’s own meagre weapons, spitting fire at the incoming torpedoes. Still too far out to score any hits. Eric’s computer could tell him that from fifty clicks out, but he had to admire the guts of it.

5 Seconds

The torpedoes were still burning, still accelerating. They kept accelerating right up to the moment a pulse burst the size of his ship reached out and swatted them both out the sky. Two payloads detonated and, for the space of a heartbeat, a new sun burned in Sigma-17.

Something else had jumped in.

“Lance! Lance, what the hell was that?” Eric kicked the ship’s thrusters into gear, turned the Waran’s delicate electronics away from the blast. “My sensors are screwed. I can’t see through the blast. What the hell just happened?”

The radio was deathly silent. When it did speak, it wasn’t with Lance’s voice. It was a young woman’s, made crackling and weak by the blast, but cold, cruel, and sure as winter. “Let me help you improve your future life choices.”

Finally, the waran’s computers pulled an image out of the blast. Cold fear settled in Eric’s chest, and he immediately wished they hadn’t. A cruiser, clean and sleek as a fresh-forged blade hung in space between him and the jump hole. Weapons twisted in their mountings and, though it was too distant to see, Eric could feel the stares of a dozen unblinking rangefinders. The computers could too.

No fewer than three different warnings strobed on his screen. Infrared, radar, visible. Eric was being targeted in more spectrums then his ship could see in. Heat still radiated from a pair of pulse cannons on the ship’s bow, slowly fading from red to yellow on his display as some internal mechanism whisked the heat away. It flashed the same transponder as the transports; Vereinigte Widerstandarmee.

“Whoa. Whoa, we can talk about this.” Eric stuttered, thumbed the comms.

Slowly, almost lazily, a missile left one of the cruiser’s tubes. Half a second later, another followed it. If he hadn’t silenced the warnings, a dozen klaxons would have been screaming in his ears. Without them, the cockpit was disturbingly silent.

Eric turned the waran and gunned the engine. He hit a switch and chaff dropped from the belly of the ship like autumn leaves. Close. Christ, they were close. He tugged the control column hard, rolled the ship around him and away from the countermeasures, g-force pulling him tight against the straps. Then, there was nothing but speed as the waran surged forward, cruise engine shoving the ship out of its orbit.

Behind him there was a flash of light as a missile slammed into the countermeasure and detonated.

Heart still pounding in his chest, Eric breathed a sigh of relief. A prayer of thanks to whatever god watched over renegades and desperate fathers.

The second missile hit.

Eric Brooks felt an awful, shuddering pain. Then nothing.